Apostrophe's loss has purists up in arms

It may soon be a little easier to mind your pea's and queues in Birmingham.

Even in Toronto, apostrophe use is inconsistent. A frustrated British city does away with the mark in street signs.

By:Kenneth KiddFEATURE WRITER, Published on Wed Feb 04 2009

It may soon be a little easier to mind your pea's and queues in Birmingham.

Or so think the British city's politicians, now that they've decided to ban all apostrophes from street signs, on the grounds that they're fussy, old-fashioned and confusing.

For decades, apparently, residents have been embroiled in heated debates around punctuation in signs for such local landmarks as St. Pauls Square or Acocks Green.

A verbal donnybrook on whether Kings Heath should be rewritten with an apostrophe proved to be the last straw for Councillor Martin Mullaney. "I had to make a final decision on this," he says. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

This week, Birmingham city council agreed, and a lot of grammarians and general sticklers are none too pleased. "They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language," says Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign. "It's always worth the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them."

Or consider the prickly prose of Lynne Truss in her bestselling book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves:

"Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended ... imagine the scene. Triumphant abolitionist sits down to write, 'Goodbye to the Apostrophe: we're not missing you a bit!' and finds that he can't."

But are apostrophes denoting possession in place names like St. Mary's Road a possible exception?

Isn't it already hard enough for people to keep all the other uses of apostrophes straight, not least those green grocers who wrongly insist on advertising "pea's" and "carrot's"? Or consider the confusion that ensues when "it's" becomes "its," or "Mary's books" morphs into "Marys' books."

"Because place names are more unambiguous than the language, they can manage without an apostrophe," says Katherine Barber, founding editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. "In place names, it's not even a pure possessive, because St. Mary's Road is not really a road that belongs to St. Mary."

And it's not as if English speakers – from St. Catharines to Peggy's Cove by way of Queens Quay – have ever been consistent about the use of apostrophes in place names.

"We don't seem to have an official policy," says Brian McMullan, the mayor of St. Catharines, Ont., which is, in fact, named after a single Catharine. "I do know that, where possible, we try to use correct English, or the Queen's English, and use apostrophes wherever possible.

"But not in the name of the town, no, and that's just been tradition here as long as I can remember."

Such waywardness fits with the apostrophe's tortured history in English, a language it didn't enter until the 16th century, courtesy of the French. It eventually became widespread, denoting all manner of missing letters and possession, but never in any rule-bound fashion.

In the late 19th century, printers and grammarians tried to lay down some firm guidelines. But as the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language notes: "Unfortunately, with such a long period of varying usage to consider, the rules which they devised were arbitrary."